I’d decided that my Human Mage, Kinevra, was DONE. That she’d had her day, that I wasn’t going to take her to Draenor. So I didn’t do the pre-launch Blasted Lands questline with her.

Kinevra had, however, accumulated quite a few things that I dearly wished I had on my Blood Elf Mage instead — the Theramore Arcanist’s Hat from the pre-Mists Theramore scenario “event”, T13 robe & shoulders from playing with the OLRG, Burning Embers for the first step of the Tarecgosa quest chain — so I considered faction-transferring her over to be a Blood Elf. When I looked through her inventory, though, I found that she had some Alliance-specific items that I didn’t want to lose.

Then I thought about how my Blood Elf Mage has a serious case of faction envy and would Blink over to the Alliance just as fast as she could if High Elves ever became a playable race for the Alliance. Seeing the Alliance’s Mage Tower when I finally got to Ashran with my Draenei Mage last week, I knew that my Blood Elf Mage would want to have that structure, not the Horde’s Spirit Lodge, in her Garrison.

The character of Kinevra, the wide-eyed, freckle-faced teenager from Theramore with a hopeless crush on Anduin Wrynn, is DONE — but I decided that I’m not DONE with playing a Human Mage. With a change of name and face, my level 90 Human Mage is now Kaylynda, Kaelinda’s Alliance doppelganger/surrogate.
And she will be going to Draenor.

After having spent all that time in frigid Icecrown grinding Silver Covenant rep, I suppose it’s not all that surprising that the Silver Covenant tabard was the first thing my two Alliance Mages thought of when they set out to make “iceberg” Transmogrification kits.

Aldor CovenantPauldrons & Vestments of the Aldor, Nethershard Girdle, Gloves of the Fallen Wizard, Staff of the Unknown Road, Silver Covenant Tabard
Why the Silver Covenant NPCs are wearing Mage T4 raiment, I don’t know. But because they are, and because the Aldor are a Draenei faction, and because she is Draenei, Kaprikka insisted upon dressing like the Silver Covenant NPCs for her Silver Covenant set rather than coming up with something more original.
Kaprikka chose this hairstyle to go with this set in honor of her hero/role-model concerning all things Draenei and Mage-ical, Millya.

After three intense months of mogging, Dragonray’s Mog the World in 80 Days competition has come to an end and the Grand Prize has been awarded. Dragonray, Navimie, Cymre, and I discussed at least three different methods of determining the overall winner, and Syrco came out on top in every analysis!

prize banner by Cymre

Bravo, Syrco!

Runner-up Plaid Elf came in a very close second in all the same analyses. Her winning set for Uruguay in Week 8 would make a totally boss outfit for Anduin Wrynn, dontcha think?I spent quite a while trying to get the face to look right before I gave up and cheated by putting in the face from my WMV pose reference picture.

I had a blast helping to judge the competition. I was so impressed by the creativity of all the participants. I looked forward to seeing what fabulous new outfits would be up in the Judges’ Corner each weekend. Here are some of my personal favorite outfits from each week that didn’t win — either I gave my highest score of the week to this outfit but the outfit I gave my second-highest score to won instead, or I gave my second-highest score to this outfit on a week in which the outfit I gave the highest score to did win.

For everyone who participated, I’ve made this badge to display on your blog, if you wish:

Thank you, Dragonray, for hosting such a splendid Transmogrification event!

For the past several weeks, I’ve felt like Kaprikka, Koralyra, and Kinevra have been racing each other to get to 90, and that any one of them could potentially get there first.

Though I’ve drawn them all sprinting, Kaprikka is really the only one who’s sprinting, as she started the furthest behind. The other two have really just been jogging.

Koralyra tends to move in fits and starts; unless there’s a holiday going on, when I feel like doing the Pet Battle circuit, she gets XP, and when I don’t, she doesn’t. She’s currently about three-quarters of the way from 87 to 88.

Kinevra began the expansion at 85, of course, and has been slowly and steadily plugging away at various past-expansion daily hubs. She’s gotten a trickle of XP from running Firelands with the Old Ladies, too. This week, she finally reached level 87 and made a trip to Pandaria to get her Grummlepack. Because she was fully well-rested, that expedition got her about three-quarters of the way to 88.

Kaprikka dinged 80 on April 3rd and got to 85 about a week ago, on the 19th:
She then made a quick trip to Pandaria. After getting to the point where the portal from Paw’don Glade to Stormwind was open, she rode up to Dawn’s Blossom to buy some gear to let her queue for Pandaria dungeons. She’s been diligently fishing in the Dalaran fountain while waiting out her LFD queues. Friday night this week turned out to be a fine night for fishing indeed!
Now she’ll be able to use Bipsi’s Bobbing Berg just as soon as she can buy it! Yesterday, she went back to Pandaria and dinged 87 helping Ken-Ken save Zhu’s Watch. She then went up to Kun-Lai to get her Grummlepack; unlike Kinevra, she was already out of well-rested and only got forty-some-odd percent of the way to 88. Next, she rode down to the Incursion — I was pretty creeped out by suddenly having Lorekeeper Vaeldrin using Mind Vision on my character, versus a Horde character’s encounter with Chezin Dawnchaser at the side of the road — and by the time she reached the Sentinel Basecamp, she’d also dinged 88. Now that she’s pulled into the lead, Kaprikka will most likely be the winner.

Having played through the Dawnchaser storyline first, and multiple times, Sentinel Lyalia’s opinions of the Sunwalkers pain me. Not trusting the Horde is a Sentinel’s business, but the Sunwalkers — and especially the Dawnchasers! — sure don’t seem to me like they’re “the most militant branch of the tauren armies within the horde”! Not when Kor Bloodtusk vehemently complains about their pacifism! Either Lyalia is dreadfully misinformed, or I am — is there something that Sunwalkers, specifically, do somewhere in Kalimdor that I don’t know about yet because I haven’t played through most of those zones as Alliance?

I began this project last summer, as a follow-up to my rather crudely-assembled racial height and build comparison.
At the time, however, the sexism-in-WoW discussion was going around again, and I felt that it would be rather gauche to post what is undeniably an objectified image: I have reduced my models to shapes to be studied.

I’d been meaning to complete it anyway, but somehow BTH always seemed to already be using the tablet to work on his comic whenever I wanted to work on it :P

With all the wonderful new model previews being released, I figured I’d better finish this up quick, even though some of the subtleties of the stances and the shapes will soon be out-of-date.

I had been thinking I’d do a further follow-up of close-up studies of the front and profile shapes of the faces, because I feel like I still don’t have a really good grasp on how to make some of the races different from my standard way of drawing human people. I’d like to do a companion set of “beach bums of Azeroth”, too, because I feel that I understand the male shapes even less than the female shapes. Maybe I should wait on that until all the new models come out in 6.0, though.

Speaking of the new models, I’ve liked all the ones we’ve seen glimpses of so far, and I look forward to seeing the Night Elf, the Troll, and especially the Tauren. The new female Orc makes me wish I hadn’t deleted my level 35 Orc Enhancement Shaman. I do hope the shaved head texturing makes it into the final model.

One of my current favorite WoW webcomics is Away From Reality. It’s funny, the characters are likeable, and the art is totally unique from any other WoW webcomic I’ve ever seen. Instead of drawing, screencapping, or using WMV, Erik Jensen uses the program Poser to model and render his characters. Although this makes the art less immediately recognizable as being derived from WoW, I think the more broad-spectrum fantasy game look also makes the comic more accessible to non-WoW players.

*Night elf hunter Targe is formally the fifth member of the “main cast”, but it’s seemed to me like Thizzible has made more appearances than Targe since the crew reached Pandaria.

The outfits in the picture are (somewhat loosely) based on the in-game clothing items that I thought best matched the clothing the characters wear in the comic — though these are not, obviously, complete Transmogrification kits because most of them are lacking gloves.